Summil

Summil stood on a sandy hill on the coastal plain, surrounded by wadis, with secondary roads linking it to the al-Majdal–Bayt Jibrin highway. Its people believed the village was founded in 1168 by the Hospitallers, to protect the Crusader castle at Bayt Jibrin, and that it was named after Samuel, one of its Crusader founders. It was also called Barakat al-Khalil — ‘the blessing of Abraham’ — because the Mamluk sultan Barquq (d. 1399) endowed its tax revenues to the mosque of Abraham in Hebron. In 1596 Summil was a village in the nahiya of Gaza with 363 people. Edward Robinson, passing in the mid-nineteenth century, noted ‘a considerable village on an elevation in the plain,’ with a public well eleven feet across and more than a hundred feet deep and ‘a portion of an ancient wall apparently once belonging to a castle.’ Under the Mandate the village expanded southwestward and looked to al-Faluja, six kilometers away, for commerce, medicine, and administration. Its people were Muslims; their mosque was built on the remnants of a Crusaders’ church, and their school, opened in 1936, had eighty-eight pupils by the mid-1940s. Domestic water came from the forty-eight-meter-deep al-Khalil well; rainfed grain and sheep were their living, with grapes and figs besides — 16,093 dunums of cereals in 1944/45. The 1945 survey counted 950 people.

Summil was captured in one of the Giv’ati Brigade’s thrusts south during the ‘Ten Days’ between the two truces of July 1948, probably in the operation’s early stages, between 9 and 14 July; the exact date is not recorded. In that offensive Israeli forces seized a broad swath of territory south of the Jerusalem–Ramla road and displaced more than 20,000 people. Israeli military accounts later claimed the inhabitants fled at the approach of the columns, but the History of the War of Independence itself speaks of ‘several clearing operations’ in the area, and Summil is named among them; its people were probably driven eastward to the Hebron hills.

Four settlements were established on what were traditionally village lands — Qedma in 1946, before the war, and Segula, Menucha, and Nachala in 1953 — with Wardon following in 1968. Of Summil itself, the remnant of a wall, perhaps one that ringed the village, is still visible, and an old cactus-lined road can be traced; the rest of the site lies under mallow, grass, and Christ’s-thorn, with a shanty housing an Arab family built on the land. The adjacent fields are cultivated.

Sources

• Summil — Palestine Remembered
• Summil — Zochrot
• Summil — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)